Lapsed items and the Lapsed shelf
When an item goes past due and nobody claims it, Scout does not leave it in your Inbox forever and does not throw it away. After ten business days it moves the item to the Lapsed shelf, where it stays intact and can be brought back with a single click.
Screenshot: the Lapsed shelf, reached from the Housekeeping row in the Inbox or from the Lapsed page.
The rule, exactly
An item lapses only when all of these are true:
- It is still open — not settled, not already lapsed.
- Nobody has claimed it. A claimed item never lapses, however late it is.
- It has a due date, and that date is earlier than today.
- It has been visible in somebody's Inbox continuously for at least ten business days since the date passed.
Business days mean weekdays; Saturdays and Sundays do not count. Undated items never lapse, because there is no date to pass. Scout checks for newly lapsed work every hour.
What lapsing is not
It is worth being blunt about this, because the word sounds like a penalty:
- Nothing is deleted. The item, its evidence and its history are all preserved.
- It is not a closure. A lapsed item was never handled, dismissed or resolved. Scout has not decided the work did not matter.
- Nobody is blamed. Lapsing is silent — it sends no notification to followers and no message to anyone.
- It is not the same as Settled. Settled holds finished work. Lapsed holds work that was never picked up.
What lapsing is for is keeping your action item list honest. An Inbox full of items nobody has touched in three weeks stops being a list of what needs you today.
Reading the shelf
The Lapsed page shows every lapsed item you are allowed to see, across all Inbox scopes, with two numbers at the top — how many are lapsed now, and how many lapsed in the last seven calendar days — and the exact dates and time zone that seven-day window covers. The weekly number counts items that lapsed in that window even if they have since been revived or settled, so it is a measure of what slipped, not of what is sitting there.
Each row shows the client, the title, when it lapsed, and the teams that are eligible to claim it. Items are listed 50 at a time, and there is a search box and the same date filter the Settled archive uses (set to all history by default for this view).
Bringing an item back
- Open Lapsed — from the Housekeeping row in the Inbox, or the Lapsed page directly.
- Click the item you want. The reading pane opens with the heading Lapsed while unclaimed and the sentence "This item passed its due date and stayed unclaimed for 10 business days. Its history is preserved here."
- Under Bring it back to the Inbox, pick a team if you belong to more than one that may claim it (Claim for team).
- Choose Claim to revive.
The item returns to the Inbox, open again, with you accountable for it. Its lapse is kept in the history — reviving does not erase the fact that it lapsed. Claiming is the only way to revive: there is no separate "unlapse" control.
If the item is not yours to claim, the pane says so plainly: "You can review this item. Claim is currently unavailable for your membership and teams." Owners, Admins and Members can claim work in their own teams; Viewers cannot claim anything.
Good to know
- In a workspace with one active person, items do not lapse at all — Scout treats a solo workspace's work as already claimed.
- The empty state reads "Nothing has lapsed." with a short explanation. That is the state you want to be in.
- A rising weekly lapse count usually means routing, not laziness: work is landing in a queue nobody watches. Check which team the lapsed items sit with.
- Lapsed items also appear in the Settled archive when you switch it to the Lapsed tab, so you can search them with the same filters.